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MidwestRoots.net
Professional Genealogy Services for the Midwest, by Harold Henderson, CG (SM).

Certified Genealogist and CG are proprietary service marks
of the Board for Certification of Genealogists® used by the
Board to identify its program of genealogical competency
evaluation and used under license by the Board’s associates.

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Saturday, November 30, 2013

Sometimes professional genealogists discuss whether they should hire people to do some of the more routine tasks involved in the work -- straightforward lookups, or some aspects of report creation. Although I'm in favor of job creation, I've never seriously considered this (except for faraway record retrievals).

Now I've come to realize why hiring this kind of help doesn't fit my style. Sometimes I notice new things when I have to mess around with data or formatting one more time -- creating an associates list, or looking through a census page by page, or just trying to find the right image in a multi-volume digitized record set. It reminds me of someone's lament from sixty years ago or so, when mechanical dryers were replacing the once-ubiquitous backyard clotheslines. Most housewives were happy to be liberated from capricious weather conditions and boring labor, but one of them did lament: "I used to do some of my best thinking at the clothesline."

At some levels, genealogy is all about rearranging random things and trying to see patterns in them (in order to have something to verify!). And sometimes I think better when I'm not trying to. If this is your pattern too, you may be better off with more routine tasks to perform!

Harold Henderson, "'I used to do some of my best thinking at the clothesline,'" Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 30 November 2013 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : viewed [date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Don't miss the statistical summaries of the state censuses, which have what could be backhanded information about individuals (if you can identify them) as well as contextual information on what was happening in particular towns. The Town of Amity in Allegany County, for instance, had no lunatics, two idiots (both under 21), eleven sawmills, one distillery (producing $1100 worth of distilled product), and one ashery. I have mainly used these summaries to compare my research target's land and production with the town or county average.

Friday, November 22, 2013

Yesterday at Allen County, I found a published cemetery reading. In order to take it home, I photocopied the page it was on, the earlier page that identified the cemetery, two earlier pages that located the cemetery in a map of the township, and the title page of the book. If the authors had written an introduction explaining how they conducted their project, I could have made six copies instead of just one.

Granted, it's not the best evidence -- that would be a visit to the original record (the grave marker or sexton's list) or a photo on Find A Grave or other similar collaborative site. But in order to know about the information I did have, I really did need all those copies. No normal person would remember a year later exactly where that single page came from.

Of course, that specific procedure of photocopying is 20th-century stuff. But the same principles apply when I pull a microfilm or whisk over to check an original census page on Ancestry or an Ohio probate on FamilySearch. Unless I know where the information came from, it's not all that valuable.

Taking the time to image or write down the particulars of the source before opening it up is the best way to research -- in any century.

Tuesday, November 19, 2013

The Newberry Library and Internet Archive now have almost all the Chicago City Council minutes from 1865 to 1963 on line and searchable. If your Chicagoan might have had anything to do with the city -- such as getting paid for a contract or claiming damages -- you can search individual volumes.

Unfortunately it's not always easy to tell which years are covered in which volumes, or how to get to the ones you want. Below are links to each of the volumes, from which you can browse page by page, search for surnames or agency names or any other useful word, or just download and work offline. Should be great for political history and microhistory as well as genealogy!

* = missing pages as described on the site
missing volume numbers = volumes the Newberry does not have

Harold Henderson, "Chicago's City Council from the Civil War to the Cold War," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 19 November 2013 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : viewed [date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Friday, November 15, 2013

Genealogists divide up in many ways: young and old, amateur and professional, those who know who Tom Jones and Elizabeth Shown Mills are and those who don't. Another, similar, lesser-known divide is the one separating locals and cosmopolitans.

These terms come out of 20th-century sociology. One classic source is available free on JSTOR, as long as you read sociologese: Alvin W. Gouldner, "Cosmopolitans and Locals: Toward an Analysis of Latent Social Roles," Administrative Science Quarterly 2 [December 1957]:281-306. Technically, these terms describe people's loyalties or behaviors that they and their fellows aren't necessarily fully aware of -- whether their main loyalties are to their localities (often where they grew up) or to a non-local set of standards or procedures. Gouldner was actually writing about 20th-century corporations, elaborating on the difference between "company men" and "experts." My personal take is that if you ask people whether they loved high school or couldn't wait to get out, those who loved it would mostly turn out to be locals and those who left ASAP would mostly be cosmopolitans.

Genealogy in many ways is based on microscopic local knowledge. Often it's critical to know what the local insane asylum was called in the 1870s, or all the different names a particular rural graveyard had. So localism in genealogy cannot be disparaged as ignorant provincialism the way it might be in physics or chemistry. And it's certainly not incompatible with high standards and wide knowledge.

In the long run and in the hard cases genealogy also requires a problem-solving orientation that cuts across many localities -- especially in the US where so many people moved so often. And since many of us ourselves move often, and didn't enjoy high school, genealogy also attracts people who are themselves inclined to be locals only on occasion and only by choice.

In my limited experience, local societies tend to be dominated by "locals" in this sense. This may only become obvious when the meeting's program consists of members sharing stories about their first day of school -- and almost everyone is of course talking about schools within a few miles of the society's meeting place. Also in my experience, locals may tend to have a skeptical attitude, verging on self-satisfaction, toward non-local expertise and non-local societies.

Do you find these concepts helpful? Do you have your own local/cosmopolitan stories? Or are you both?

Tuesday, November 12, 2013

The Wisconsin State Historical Society kindly takes us behind the curtain and lets us know that it's about halfway through digitizing its 8,000 Sanborn insurance maps, proceeding alphabetically. So this is especially good news if your town of interest is big enough and falls in the alphabet between Ableman (Sauk County, 1912) and Marshfield (Wood County, 1904). The rest of the alphabet should be done by next spring, and will be followed by digitizing the 800 insurance maps for Milwaukee, which present special problems. You can go direct to their free on-line map images too.

And if there's anyone reading this who never heard of Sanborn Fire Insurance maps, you are in for the treat of your genealogy life. Intended to record information relevant to the insurability of specific buildings and towns, for us they offer detailed enough information to build a replica of our ancestors' late-19th- or early-20th-century home towns. (I used them a bunch when writing about my relatives in Wharton, Texas, a place where I have never set foot.)

* have made "unique, pioneering, or exemplary" contributions to the field. Possible examples given by NGS (italics added by me) include having

authored books or articles that added significantly to the body
of published works, and/or that serve as models of genealogical research
and writing;

made genealogical source records more readily available to the
public by preserving, transcribing, translating, abstracting, indexing,
and/or publishing such records;

shared with others knowledge of genealogical research methods
and sources through teaching and lecturing and/or publication of
educational materials; and

contributed time, labor, and leadership to a genealogical
organization or a genealogical periodical publication, thus enabling
that organization or publication to make significant contributions to
the field of genealogy in the United States.

The first member, elected in 1986, was the indefatigable Donald Lines Jacobus (above), who should need no introduction here; the most recent, elected in 2013, was Earl Gregg Swem, who among other things compiled the Virginia Genealogical Index.

Friday, November 8, 2013

. . . there are worse things than surname-only indexes, but not many. (In another couple of generations "indexes" may be as little understood as cursive writing.)

. . . a genealogical periodical from Omaha is called "Remains To Be Found."

. . . the father-in-law of the son of a main character in a forthcoming article died of unnatural causes in 1835 in Canton, Fulton County, Illinois: a tornado drove a wagon-wheel spoke through his groin. This unexpected death information appeared in an abstract of an 1892 newspaper article.

. . . Walsh County, North Dakota, published four volumes of cemetery readings labeled as volumes 25, 26, 27, and 28.

. . . the charmingly titled book Forty Years of Funerals did not include the funeral I was looking for.

. . . the first case heard by the (traveling) Supreme Court in Greene County, Ohio, was the first-degree murder of an Indian (Billy George AKA Kenawa Tuckans) by two white men in 1804.

. . . when you're J. P. Morgan's son and you die in 1943, you get an obituary that names seven generations of ancestors. (OK, it was in the New York Genealogical and Biographical Record, but still . . . )

Harold Henderson, "Just another day at the office . . .," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 8 November 2013 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : viewed [date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

One reason genealogy has such an enormous range is that it is inevitably two very different things: a personal quest based on personal memories and attitudes formed at a young age on one hand, and a demanding technique and profession on the other. The two blend and confront in many different ways, but each of us has a moment when our personal memories run head-on into original eyewitness documents that say otherwise. Beginners may reject documents that conflict with their personal impressions, often going into great intellectual contortions to do so; higher-level genealogists give the documents serious consideration, while recognizing that they too could be wrong.

This confrontation is the downfall of the popular notion of laissez-faire genealogy -- the idea that there are lots of ways to do genealogy and nothing is really wrong. There are lots of ways that work, but the denial of conflicting evidence is not one of them.

No one who dismisses documentary evidence out of hand in favor of "Grandma said..." can be taken seriously as a genealogist. Of course they may be wonderful people, and in any case we should always be polite, always be kind. But a genealogist has to be willing to weigh conflicting evidence -- to analyze and correlate and resolve contradictions. Sometimes Grandma wins, sometimes she doesn't. (Yes, even my own.)

Those who simply cling to family stories may know valuable facts that no one else does, but they aren't genealogists, any more than those who deny evolution are biologists.

Monday, November 4, 2013

One way to break a Dark Age deadlock is to find a literate and gossipy neighbor who wrote things down. Even better is to find one who had his or her reminiscences published. Best of all if it's someone that you're actually related to.

When you find such a treasure, don't stop at extracting the genealogical gold (like an overseas grandfather's date of death). In fact, if you have any people anywhere in eastern or southeastern Ohio in the early 1800s, you will enjoy William Cooper Howells's Recollections of Life in Ohio from 1813 to 1840. His son was the well-known literary man William Dean Howells (1837-1920), and Howells families (with a terrifyingly small set of given names) are tangled throughout the Midwest and right back to eighteenth-century Wales. The senior Howells's lucid and astringent recollections also provide a model of style and tone for those of us likely to fall into sentimentalism or other kinds of editorializing.

As young boys, William Cooper Howells and his brother Tom plowed difficult ground with a difficult horse and not much harness:

When the corn was small [Paddy the horse] would get out of the rows and trample the corn, and when it had grown to some size he would stop to eat it in spite of all the efforts we could make with loud hallooing on my part and vigorous thrashing on Tom's part. . . . We had no buckles to the harness, and with our little hands we could not tie a knot that would stand. It was the same when we hauled wood, which we mostly did by the process called "snaking." We would tie a chain around the end of a log, and thereby drag it on the ground. If the log was small, or there was snow, we got along pretty well; but if the load was heavy, we usually had a scene of balking and harness breaking trying to my patience and unpleasant to Tom if he rode. Paddy was a safe horse -- that is, he was small, and it did not hurt any one to fall from him, and if he didn't stay in his tracks he was always to be found where there was something to eat.

In the spring of 1821 his (unnamed) uncle Howells decided to move 80 miles to an unsettled area of Coshocton County, where he could only afford to lease land. With young William's help, they took along cattle, sheep, and pigs as well as household goods and tools.

The loading up of the wagons occupied nearly the whole day of starting, and it was late in the afternoon when we mustered the cattle, sheep and pigs in the rear of the wagons. . . . To start off with such a mixed drove of animals was no trifling affair, for, though they would drive pretty well after getting used to the road and a day or two's experience, their obstinacy and contrariety at first was without parallel, and a boy to each animal was little enough. First, a pig would dart back and run like a deer till he was headed and turned, by which time the others would meet him and all have to be driven up; while in the meantime a cow or two would be sailing down a by-lane with elevated head and tail, and a breathless boy circling through a field or the woods to intercept her career . . . . We worked along till night, when we put up, about seven miles from the starting point.

Plenty more where that came from . . .

William Cooper Howells, Recollections of Life in Ohio from 1813 to 1840 (Cincinnati: The Robert Clarke Company, 1895), 82-83, 87; digital images, Internet Archive (https://archive.org/details/recollectionsofl011646mbp : viewed October 2013).

Harold Henderson, "Daily work for boys in southeast Ohio around 1820," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 4 November 2013 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : viewed [date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Friday, November 1, 2013

No matter what I'm saying or doing,
somebody somewhere knows more about it than I do. Having that fact
pointed out may embarrass me, but it does not constitute elitism on the
part of the person who pointed it out. It's just a fact, whether the
subject is lawn care, genealogy, quantum physics, fashion, making a
pie, lepidoptera, or muscle cars.

If I don't like the fact, in today's world I can
readily find many ways to learn more. If I choose not to learn more,
then I need to become comfortable with where I have chosen to stop.